Brothers, We Are Not Entrepreneurs: A Call for Lutheran Church Planters to Be Pastors

While there are differing ideas about church planting in Lutheran circles, there is one concept that seems to bring divergent schools of thought together:  the centrality of the church planter to the success of a church plant. Hand-in-glove with this concept is the idea that a church planter needs to be an entrepreneur (or at least possess an entrepreneurial spirit). Alex Early of the Acts 29 network summarizes this view well when he writes, “Church planting in the 21st Century is a bold task. Being a gospel-centered, innovative church planter implies that you are going to have to have some entrepreneurial aptitude. … As church planters, entrepreneurial aptitude is a must. We cannot afford to keep doing things the way that we’ve always done them.” This view of the marks of a potentially successful church planter has certainly influenced Lutheran church planting.  Recognizing the need to be more active in planting new churches and desiring to be successful in our endeavors, Lutheran church planting leaders and practitioners have sought out and embraced the church planting principles and practices of authors, consultants, and organizations that have a very different understanding of the church than we confess (and therefore a different understanding of the church’s purpose, the marks of the church, what is healthful for the church, etc.). Though highly popular among church planting experts, the entrepreneurial church planter embodies a number of the elements of contemporary church planting thought that are counterproductive to planting authentically Lutheran churches. 

What is an entrepreneurial church planter and why is one so dangerous to planting Lutheran churches? Although the idea that church planters need to be entrepreneurs is widely held, there is hardly a consensus as to what constitutes an entrepreneurial church planter. Drawing on several sources from the church planting movement, academia, and business, an entrepreneur is characterized as being visionary, market savvy, innovative, self-driven, and success-oriented. These five characteristics are centered in the entrepreneur. What this means in practical terms for church planting is that the church plant is defined, driven, and developed as an expression of the entrepreneurial church planter. The vision for a church plant originates with the church planter and is his vision for the church for which he works to recruit and align supporters. The prospects of the church plant rest in the abilities of the church planter to market his vision to a target audience through human techniques such as demographic analysis and surveying target groups to ascertain consumer interests (i.e., felt needs). As an innovator the church planter has license to establish the modes of operating the church plant as he determines as necessary to support his vision and execute his marketing plan. The self-driven nature of the entrepreneurial church planter focuses him inwardly for the strength, insight, and ingenuity to move his agenda for the church plant forward. Lastly, the success-orientation of the entrepreneurial church planter focuses his attention on measurable results, especially the number of people that are attracted to his vision and supportive of his efforts. In short, the grave danger of planting churches with an emphasis on (let alone the necessity of!) a church planter being an entrepreneur is that, by its very nature, it tends toward being a man-centered effort.

We must divest ourselves of the influence of the church planting movement and its emphasis on man-centered church planting if we are going to plant authentically Lutheran churches. To begin with, the vision for the new church must originate in the missio dei and not in the imagination of a church planter (or any other human being). When it is, the vision will invariably be centered and focused in Word and Sacrament. The Lutheran church planter will embrace this by gathering people around Word and Sacrament as the defining vision of the church plant. Rather than relying on human techniques for analyzing a target market, the faithful church planter will rely on God’s Word and the guidance of the Holy Spirit to exegete the culture of the community in which Word and Sacrament ministry will be established. As such, the church planter should be well versed in theology, not marketing. How the Word and Sacrament ministry will be brought to the community is a matter of creativity rather than innovation. Unlike an entrepreneur who, in the words of the economist Joseph Schempeter, shatter the status quo and set up new things in place of it, a Lutheran church planter looks to bring what is ancient and well established to contemporary people (whether modern or post-modern) knowing that it is new and different for them. In contrast to the self-drive of entrepreneurs, a church planter recognizes that the starting point of the church planting endeavor is denying oneself. A church planter is willing to forsake his goals, preferences, and priorities in order to serve others, especially those who make up the community he is seeking to reach with the Gospel. Above all, a faithful church planter recognizes that the call to plant churches is a call to bear the cross rather than to achieve success in human terms. In other words, what we need to be faithful in planting Lutheran churches are for church planters to be pastors rather than entrepreneurs.

SDG
@RevMAWood